1. Sarah McGrath (2003) argues that some behavior involves both doing and allowing harm. Such behavior would not count as allowing for the purposes of a moral distinction between doing and allowing harm.

2. This issue is relevant
also to the debate over abortion, the debate over capital punishment,
and the more theoretical debate over consequentialism. See Scheffler
(1982), Smart (1973) and Williams (1973). See also Haydar (2010)

4. See Frowe (2007) for a similar strategy applied to Tooley’s Machine case (Tooley 1972, 108). See Trammell (1975) for criticism that our intuitions may not be sensitive enough to detect a moral distinction between killing and letting die in the bathtub cases, given the overwhelming effect of the agent’s malicious intentions.

5. See Malm (1992) for and Purves (2011) for defences of the contrast strategy in the light of these criticisms and Asscher (2007) for further criticisms
of the contrast strategy.

6. See Bradley and Stocker (2005) for criticism of Scheffler’s arguments.

7. See Thomson (1986) and
Foot (1978) for early statements and reactions to the Trolley
Problem. See Fischer and Ravizza (eds.) (1992) for a representative sample of
reactions to the problem. See Thomson (2008) for Thomson’s most recent
treatment of the problem.

8.
We talk about allowing the tree to fall, but we do not talk about
“doing the tree fall”. We do of course talk about
“making the tree fall” and “causing the tree to
fall,” but these terms are to be avoided because they suggest
that allowing the tree to fall is not a way of causing it to fall,
and, as will be argued below, this is wrong.

10. This idea, which has its
roots in Hume’s writings, is developed in Lewis (1986). Note that the
definition mentioned in the text represents the gut idea of the
counterfactual account of causation. Subsequent versions are much more
complicated, but they all imply that letting die is a kind of
causing.

11. See Mackie (1974).
According to “transference” accounts of causation,
causation consists in the transfer of energy or momentum from one
object to another at the point of contact between the objects. Such
accounts would indeed imply that allowing was not causing. See
Aronson (1971) . But it seems then that a different premise in the
argument for the moral insignificance of the distinction would be in
trouble. The thought that one cannot be morally responsible for what
one is not causally responsible for now seems dubious. It seemed
correct, before because, on the counterfactual accounts, it is very
close to the principle that ‘ought’ implies
‘can’. If the transference account of causation is
correct, then lack of causal responsibility does not imply inability
to make a difference.

12. For argument that cases of allowing involve causing harm see Bennett (1995), 128; Kagan (1989) 92—94; Quinn (1989), 293. Bennett also argues that appeal to causation will not be able to explain the doing/allowing distinction because the doing/allowing distinction applied to non-causal consequence (Bennett 1995, 127).

13. See Munthe (1999),
for an interesting attack on the claim that the counterfactual
distinction is morally significant. Munthe argues that if true, this
claim would violate the rule that ‘ought’ implies
‘can’.

14. Quinn uses the
expression, “harmful positive agency” for doing harm and
“harmful negative agency” for allowing harm. This idea can
be traced back at least to Anscombe and Davidson; see Anscombe (1958)
and Davidson (1980).

15. Note
that Quinn’s argument for the moral significance of the distinction
doesn’t seem to hang on his account of the distinction.

16. See Strudler and
Wasserman (1995) for an interesting critique of this point.

18. See Woollard (2010) for argument that Bennett’s positive/ negative distinction is in fact morally relevant.

19. For example, Dinello
(1971). Quinn makes a similar point in (1989).

20. Note that Sassan bears obvious
resemblances to Harry Frankfurt’s famous counterexample to the
Principle of Alternative Possibilities. See Frankfurt (1969). It is
importantly different from that example, however.

21. In
correspondence with Howard-Snyder, cited in Howard-Snyder (2002).

22. See Woollard (2015) for an argument that Bennett can avoid the Sassan counterexample by reframing his account to ask not whether most ways the agent could move would have led to the harmful upshot occurring but whether most way the agent could have moved would have left the relevant fact about the agent’s behavior holding. The difference is important because the relationship between the relevant fact and the upshot may not be simply counterfactual dependence.

23. Woollard (2008) argues that Foot should not be interpreted as seeing all safety net cases as enablings.

24. This version of the Impoverished Village Case is taken from McMahan (1993). It is based on an example originally presented in Bennett (1981), p. 91. For other similar cases, see Kagan (1989), 106–11.

28.
Persson originally presents
his objection as the ‘paradox’ that the Doctrine of Doing
and Allowing implies both that it is permissible for to allow the
victim of past behavior to die in cases like Poison 1 (because it is
allowing harm) and that it is impermissible to do so (because it is
doing harm). This presentation is unfortunate as it overlooks the
fact that most supporters of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing
understand it as a claim about the moral distinction between doing harm
and merely allowing harm. But Persson’s core point
does not rest on ignoring this aspect of the Doctrine of Doing and
Allowing. He anticipates the response that the Doctrine of Doing and
Allowing could be understood so that a permission to let someone be
killed is not seen as implying a permission to let yourself kill that
person (Persson 2013, 100). His real, and much more interesting,
objections come up in discussion of this
response.

29.
Hanna argues that
strategies that seem promising for showing why allowing oneself to have
done harm is not equivalent to merely allowing harm seem to imply that
it is equivalent to doing harm—and vice versa (Hanna
2014).